#plus the backstory behind Toby bracelet ;)

[saferincages]

gAme over: in my end is my beginning

I can’t stop thinking about that ridiculous, unsatisfying finale, and how spectacular it COULD have been had they simply planned it well in advance and timed it properly. There are so many plot holes/plot threads/red herrings/unanswered questions that I cannot even begin to address them all, and I dreamed this up fairly quickly, so I apologize that it is a very rough draft and doesn’t resolve certain things completely, but it’s a sketched out version of the way I imagine this plot being able to actually work on some level:

Alex Drake is an unhappy and unstable child, abandoned by her adoptive parents and left to fend for herself at a young age, and when she is a teenager, she decides to find out the truth about her birth parents. She steals or hacks her adoption records, discovers their names and the place of her birth, and sets out for Rosewood, PA. When she arrives, she discovers that she has both an older sister, Cece Drake, and a twin sister, Spencer Hastings. Cece has recently been released from Radley (for whatever backstory reason you want to give her, because anything would be better reasoning than her canonical reveal), and is living independently, so Alex approaches her first, assuming (correctly) that she will have less of a chance of being rejected by another lost sibling than by the parents of her twin. Though Alex is of course immediately drawn to Spencer, Cece tells her horrible things about the Hastings, along with the fact that Spencer has no idea she was adopted, and so, instead of immediately introducing herself to Spencer, she hangs back to see what her life is like. 

She discovers that Spencer is close friends with a girl who is (as far as she can see) an awful bully, so she decides that the best way to immediately ingratiate herself to her twin and her twin’s friends is to remove this bully from their lives. “That Night,” she witnesses the girls’ sleepover in the barn, realizes Ali has drugged them, and takes the opportunity. She attacks Ali, hitting her over the head, meaning to frighten but not kill her - but, of course, she doesn’t know the girls all that well yet, and recognizing Ali from behind in the dark and the utter chaos of the night proves difficult. The girl she actually hit was Sara Harvey, who was simply passing through Rosewood - Melissa (also mistakenly thinking Sara was Ali), witnesses this attack and thinks she’s seeing Spencer, who is struggling with substance abuse and the mood swings and memory lapses which accompany it, murder Ali. Horrified, she approaches the body in a panic, but she sees her face, and knows it isn’t Alison. She rushes up to Ali’s room, where Ian is still waiting, and Ian (because of the NAT Club, or because Ali told him at Hilton Head, choose whichever makes more sense) has discovered that Ali has been planning to disappear, and tells Melissa she’s already gone. Ali left behind both her yellow top and her name bracelet. Melissa and Ian dress the body of the anonymous girl in Ali’s clothing, and bury her in the backyard, assuming that, should anyone find her, they will initially believe it’s Alison, and it will force her to stay away (both of them want her out of town, let’s say they’re the ones who replace her dental records and such, too), but Melissa is also attempting to cover it up to protect her sister (she does not tell Ian she witnessed the murder, and Ian assumes it’s Melissa herself who killed her, thinking she was Alison).

Alex flees back to Cece, but says nothing about what she’s done. Ali is reported missing, and Cece is wracked with grief and anger, and she tells Alex a piece of their story she’d withheld before - their connection to the DiLaurentis family. Ali is both their cousin and Cece’s good friend, as Cece spent the summer getting to know her, as an initial attempt to reforge a connection to her family. Alex, having no idea that the attack she planned was against her own cousin, cannot confess what she did, for fear of Cece’s wrath, and not wanting the only family she’s ever known to reject her and throw her out. 

The girls are traumatized, and Aria’s family leaves for Iceland - all also throwing a wrench in Alex’s plan to reveal herself as their defender and become part of the group. A year passes, Aria returns, the girls begin to reforge their friendship, and Mona is -A. During this time, Cece and Alex watch and wait, for different reasons - Cece becomes more and more convinced that the girls are guilty of harming Ali that night, and wants to punish them; Alex becomes more and more obsessed with their lives, their friendship, and how “good” they seemingly have it. When Mona is admitted into Radley, Cece (knowing the place all too well due to her time there), steals the game, with Alex as her helper - disguised as Redcoat and Black Veil (Alex has to either wear the Ali mask and blond wig, or a veil over her face, because, of course, no one can know she looks exactly like Spencer). Cece’s intent is finding out what happened to Ali, but Alex has ulterior motives - she’s decided to take Spencer’s place. Cece has already begun to build the Dollhouse, thinking that kidnapping the girls will push them to tell the truth about what happened to Ali, and she and Alex devise the plan of the night in the woods with the body they fake as Toby’s, pushing Spencer to the breaking point. The plan is to put Alex in Spencer’s place while she’s in Radley, as the first step to luring and eventually abducting the rest of the girls, but a sudden twist occurs - while Spencer is in the hospital, Ali sneaks in to visit her, and Cece discovers that she’s alive. 

Cece’s intentions shift, as she now wants to bring Ali home, and Alex becomes a liability. Unbeknownst to Alex, during this time, Cece has tracked down their birth mother, Mary, and Cece convinces Mary to take Alex back to London. Alex is infuriated to be taken out of the game, but goes with her mother because she wants the chance to know her. In London, she realizes Melissa (who, of course, is also her sister) has moved there, too, and she can’t give up her interest in her family or her propensity for stalking, so she watches her, and sees her with her charming British fiancee, Wren. She becomes infatuated, and eventually approaches him, as Spencer, which is the first time she’s able to test whether or not someone will believe her in her twin’s place. She convinces him not to tell anyone that she’s there, and his feelings for Spencer override logic, so he keeps quiet. By the time she finally admits her true identity (which she is forced to do when Spencer comes to London to visit Oxford), he is already in love with her, and promises to keep her secret.

Ezra has also been spying on the girls, for his ~book~ (I hate this, but want to try and keep this as close to the convoluted canon as possible, so), and Cece approaches him, saying she has additional information that could help him finish writing it, but what she really wants is to take advantage of his knowledge and clues to discover Ali’s whereabouts, which they do, when they find her in Ravenswood. All of those events can remain in place (it’s been a long time since I saw those seasons, so forgive me for being fuzzy on the details?), but the girls can still find Ali in NYC and bring her home, and of course, Mona still wouldn’t want that, leading to her “death” as Cece takes her to the Dollhouse so that she won’t expose everything Cece has done or tell the girls all that she knows.

S5, the Dollhouse, and the events subsequent to it can also essentially stay the same - Cece tells the girls a twisted version of the truth (passing herself off as Ali’s long lost older sister, not Spencer’s, to protect both Alex and Mary’s identities), and is admitted to Welby. Alex stays in London with Wren, because she’s content for the time being simply to have someone who loves her. He tries his best to help her with her delusions, her obsessions, and her rage, and she tries to give up her thoughts of Rosewood. Mary, assured of her youngest daughter’s safety, returns to Pennsylvania to keep an eye on Cece’s care, and to confront her sister and Peter for the mess they’ve made (thus, the details with Jessica’s murder also remain, but would happen a bit later in the narrative).

Five years pass, and Cece’s release is imminent, and Alex begins to become interested in returning to Rosewood and revealing herself, though Wren has qualms about it. But then, Cece is murdered. (idc about Archer, but he could feasibly still be a part of the plot, although I’d prefer him not to dupe Ali into marrying him). At this point, Alex would’ve known her older sister for something like seven years (even if she wasn’t physically with her the entire time, their bond is strong, it’s easy to assume they’d have stayed in contact even while Cece was in Welby), and she snaps - just as Cece assumed the girls must have done something to Ali on the night that started everything, Alex now assumes they must have killed her beloved sister. She wants revenge, and in her sister’s honor, she continues the game, plotting all the girls’ downfall, and determined to finally take her rightful place in the town from whence she same. 

We, the audience, know of Alex’s existence from at LEAST Cece’s reveal, if not sooner, and thus the suspense of when she reveals herself to the girls builds continually, plus there could be a lot more scenes of possibly not knowing whether we’re watching the real Spencer or not, along with being able to witness scenes of Alex clearly being creepy in the background and planning her torture for the girls. 

They are all targeted and taunted, but they all also actively work together to figure out who this person is, and end it once and for all. They are real participants, not sidelined and irrelevant in their final episode. A lot of S7 (especially 7B) would need to be polished and reworked, but it could have been done, and everything would still wrap back to That Night, and Alex would’ve been someone who had, indeed, been hiding in plain sight for years, rather than being a coincidental encounter in a London bar. Where Cece hated the girls and viewed them as her objects, her dolls to manipulate, Alex has developed a twisted love for them (limerence, perhaps?), she wants them to know how smart she is, how long she’s watched them and shadowed their lives, how much she deserves (in her mind) to be loved and accepted by them (this sort of retreads Mona’s motive, but then...so does everything else...but I think it might have led to the girls actually realizing that perhaps they ought to have let Mona in a bit more? idk), and if they won’t let her in for who she is, then she’ll have to take her twin’s place. Liars’ Lament has some sort of real purpose, the puzzle makes an actual picture (imagine if it was Spencer’s face, and for a moment the other four girls think Spencer is AD and spend at least an episode terrified and suspecting her, before they begin to piece together that the person who has been with them for a while...wasn’t Spencer at all). Alex uses the blueprint her sister established, intending to house Spencer underground, and there’s another cell for whomever murdered Cece, too (so, Spence and Mona would’ve been in there together, rather than Spence and Ezra, although she still could’ve kidnapped Ezra in the finale too, it’s almost irrelevant, as frustrating as that is). Spencer is abducted from the Blind School, and replaced, and Alex is masquerading in her shoes for the entirety of 7B, so the girls have many episodes to observe her odd behavior, spend time with her, and begin to unravel the final mystery, concluding with them solving the mystery and racing to rescue their missing best friend (I also would’ve had Alex die at the end, but ymmv).

You can extrapolate details from there (whether Wren helped her or not, how much Mona/Ezra/Melissa/Jenna/Jason/Ian/Wilden/Garrett/whomever knew, etc etc), but these are the primary issues it could have fixed:

Bethany, since she was ultimately meaningless, never existed, the body was always Sara, and thus Shower Harvey as we knew her isn’t in the story

Alex being Redcoat/Black Veil gives an actual reason for that enigmatic figure’s existence

The fixation on the girls’ appearances pre-Ali’s disappearance (ie: the way they were dressed in the Dollhouse, the way their game pieces were designed) was because Alex had been observing them since that time.

Cece was always a mistreated daughter, eliminating all the problematic “Charles” issues, and...there are just so many unresolved issues with her reveal that would have to be filled in differently that I honestly can’t even begin to chart them, but I know there’s a way to make her reasoning less messy.

Events of That Night, Melissa protecting Spencer (even the flashback with Spencer and the shovel being spattered in blood could’ve been explained, it was Alex), why Spencer was targeted to be broken in such a vicious way in S3 - it would all tie together (I think the lodge fire could be a puzzle piece fit into place here, too, but it’s been so long since I watched those episodes that I don’t trust my memory to make sense of it).

The motives are still a bit muddy and hinge on abandonment and feelings of scorn/loneliness/loss of family (plus mental illness), but at least there’s more clarity than...what they gave us, at least there’s a path that goes back to the start.

This doesn’t resolve things like ezrA (my ultimate favorite theory), or any other truly epic theory that has been written and analyzed in the fanbase over the years; it doesn’t fix myriad plot holes and nonsensical clues (again, a lot of which might have been written and delivered entirely differently had this been planned in a more linear fashion and had Alex been established much sooner), but I’m trying to work with what we were actually given by the writers, to see if there was a way to make it thrilling and compelling, and I’m convinced they could have, had they invested the thought and the time, and it breaks my heart that they didn’t, that they took a show that was exciting and unique and beloved by many, and made such a mess of both its mystery and of its brave, complicated heroines. I still consider their sisterhood and friendship to be important and beautiful and iconic, but the mystery should have been, too.

(Feel free to add to this with clarity and/or details if you wish!)